


Water From A Stone

by VSSAKJ



Category: Tales of Graces
Genre: Dehydration, Gen, Implied/Referenced Character Death, Implied/Referenced Torture, Starvation, Tales Whump Week
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-09-23
Updated: 2018-09-23
Packaged: 2019-07-15 22:48:28
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,555
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16072979
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/VSSAKJ/pseuds/VSSAKJ
Summary: Water seems like a far-off memory, now.





	Water From A Stone

Water.

Water, tracing through the sun-baked air in the centre of Yu Liberte, with droplets sparkling like stars as daylight catches them mid-motion. Water, rushing with that familiar sound from tap to pitcher, then trickling from pitcher to cup and then, mercifully, running cool and slick and refreshing down his parched throat after a long day of drilling with his troops. Water, crashing down from the sky in the freak, once-a-year thunderstorms that ravage Strahta, staining the sand to the colour of dirt and filling his room with cloying humidity.

Water seems like a far-off memory, now.

A single, long fingernail traces down the side of Hubert’s face and neck, while the woman’s voice coos from some distance, “Where are they, Hubert? They’ve just left you here in my clutches.”

She must be closer than she sounds, if her fingers are on his face. Trailing behind the sensation of her nail is a firery ache, as his skin remembers to hurt like it’s been burnished by sand in the wind. His breath hisses out between his teeth, and she laughs softly.

“All alone here, just you and me and Protos Heis.” The woman exhales a long sigh; Hubert’s brain feels like a mess of crunching gears trying to find the purchase to spin together. She’s speaking nonsense, but the words are all he can hear.“Poor, poor you, Hubert. Just _waiting_. I’m a patient woman. I can make this last.”

Hubert finally manages to convince his eyelids to rise a millimetre, and realises that Emeraude is peering right at him, mere whispers from his face. His nose remembers how to function and he realises there’s the scent of some sort of flower, though it’s not one he recognises. With his eyes open, the rest of his body seeps into painful awareness, hanging limp and lank from manacles clamped to the wall. His wrists ache, and his shoulders ache, and his stomach especially aches.

He’s hungrier than he was when he caught the flu from Asbel and spent three solid days throwing up at even the thought of food. He’s hungrier than when he refused to eat anything for a week after Aston threw him out to Oswell. He’s hungrier than he can even parse, his stomach so shrunken and shrivelled it feels like it’s been replaced with a raisin; yet even if the food were placed in his mouth, he’s not sure he could make himself chew.

Hubert forces the thing in his mouth to move—it’s his tongue, but it feels like a dead salamander, wrinkly and dry—and Emeraude swoops in almost against his lips, still cooing, “What was that, my pet?”

“Sophie.” Hubert forms the word more certainly this time, and speaking her name brings to mind that light she shone to save them so long ago. The crusting under the edge of his eyes urges him to drift away again, but instead he lifts his head against the weight and looks beyond the waves of green hair: there, opposite him.

Sophie is nailed to the wall, with her knees pressed together on the ground and her head lolling against her chest. She isn’t brusied that he can see, but there’s blood around her; Hubert’s sure she’s suffered worse beatings than he has, even though he can’t feel anything below his knees.

Hubert jumps as the door slams—Emeraude’s left in a furious huff, and he doesn’t care, even though his wrists are burning afresh. “Sophie.” Hubert repeats in a voice he’s sure must be his own, only it’s too quiet, too weak, too hoarse to belong to him. “We’ll be okay, Sophie.” He murmurs, watching for any indication that she’s heard him. “We’ll live, Sophie.” It’s a promise he’s making to himself as well as her, as the awful sensation on his wrists proves to be blood, seeping down the inside of his arm. Has he ever noticed before whether or not Sophie breathes? How is he supposed to attend to her needs when they’re so different from those of a normal person? 

“I’m here, Sophie.” No one else will come, Hubert accepts, letting his head drop back down. But she doesn’t have to think so. “Sophie, I’m here.” He keeps his eyelids open just a crack—to keep watch over Sophie, because no one else is going to. If his eyes weren’t so damn dry, he might cry.

 

“Sophie.” Waking and sleeping don’t happen anymore, but whenever Hubert can think to say her name, he does. She never moves. Hubert’s no longer sure if the level of light in the room changes, or if instead his vision is fading into black and blue spots like the marks he knows are mottling his flesh. As a test, he tries to close the fingers of his left hand, then his right, when he realises that he can’t tell which of them are moving, if any of them are. Everything he can feel is ache, exhaustion, and hunger.

“Sophie, they aren’t coming.” They’re words Emeraude has told him, again and again, every time with a fainter smell of flowers and a heavier, sharper nail on his cheek, and he doesn’t know how long it’s been happening because he can’t think anymore. His brain has shut down, like Sophie’s, and soon, he’ll be nothing but a lifeless husk, just like her. “They’ve given us up, Sophie. We don’t matter to them.” Emeraude’s words, or his own? Hubert doesn’t know his own voice anymore, so he can’t tell whose words they are. His throat cracks as though he’s in pain, but he hurts just as much as he did… whenever ago. “Always outsiders, you and I. We’re just going to die here, Sophie. You and me, alone. That’s it. We’re just going to die.”

“Hey now, that doesn’t sound like the Lieutenant of Strahta I know.”

Hubert had thought his eyes were open, but they must be shut if this is what he’s imagining: Malik Caesar’s voice. He doesn’t even like Malik.

“Hubert!” Asbel’s voice ruptures his stupor like a bullet through an artery, and he feels two callused palms clutch his face tightly and shake him—it hurts.

“I’m fine.” Hubert hears that voice again, that strange, wispy, impossibly small voice.

The fingers on the side of his face dig in, and pain blooms beneath their touch. “Hubert, I’m sorry. We should have gotten here so much faster.” There’s a different sensation, warmth pressing into his forehead in the shape first of his brother’s lips, then of his brother’s forehead; Hubert’s certain now that he’s hallucinating a rescue in the last moments of his life. “I’ll get you out of here, Hubert, I promise. Captain, how’s Sophie?”

“Not good.” Malik’s voice again, and it rouses Hubert, who feels the final embers inside him shudder and shift.

“Leave her alone.” He won’t let anyone take Sophie away from him. They’ll die here together, and at least that will mean something. “She doesn’t need help.”

“Hate to argue, Lieutenant, but she definitely does, and so do you.” Two heavy, metallic noises thudding to the ground makes Hubert think Sophie’s been freed from the nails binding her to the wall; a grunt and smooth rustling sound imply that Malik’s swept her up in his arms. “Pascal said she’d keep the hallways clear and Cheria’s ready back at the ship. I’ll go ahead.” There’s an affirmative noise from Asbel, and then footsteps fading into the distance.

Hubert’s arm drops against his side and startles him; Asbel catches his other as it falls, then all of Hubert is canting forward, tipping towards the ground despite his certainty he’s standing straight. Next thing he knows, his mouth is full of the fabric of Asbel’s knight uniform and there’s an arm around his waist. Hubert tries to shake his head; he isn’t sure if it works. “I don’t need your help, Asbel.”

“Everything’s gonna be okay now, Hubert.” Asbel replies, and lifts. They sway; then they’re moving and if Hubert’s stomach still existed, it would be emptying itself because the whole world seems to be spinning at an upsetting speed. His nerves, dull for so long, suddenly seem electric, and Hubert twitches, words tumbling from his lips.

“Stop, Asbel stop, stop Asbel, I can’t, I can’t, I can’t—”

His whole body is dry but somehow now his eyes find moisture and nausea fills his throat, and a convulsion courses through him. His limbs start to shake—even the feet he wasn’t sure were there anymore are jolting back and forth—and for a swift second, the whole world rotates on point, then he’s laying flat on his back against cool metal, wishing he could curl into a ball, wishing he could eat, wishing—

“Asbel.”

That voice, so unlike his. Asbel’s fingers brush his forehead, kinder than Emeraude’s had ever been despite their roughness. “Yeah, Hubert?”

Everything’s become lighter—Hubert doesn’t think he can feel anything anymore, except his brother’s touch on his head. It’s… nice. He didn’t think anything would be nice ever again. The lights in the ceiling sear his eyes, and he can’t remember opening them in the first place, so he lets them drift shut once more. Ahh, there: darkness, warm and easy. Hubert thinks his lip twitches—just like a smile, maybe. “Do you have any water?”


End file.
